1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an operational assistance server device, an operational assistance method and a computer readable article of manufacture, for assisting a user who operates an application to perform an appropriate operation.
2. Description of Related Art
Conventional games are generally based on fixed scenarios. In contrast, virtual world games allow a user to freely control a character referred to as an avatar. Thus, an avatar can personify the user, go shopping, or communicate with other avatars.
More and more companies have started their activities in such virtual worlds. Many of such companies that have entered the virtual worlds aim to utilize the virtual worlds for promotions to improve their product and service sales, enhance their bland images, or carry out other types of promotions. Such companies even aim to utilize the virtual worlds for advertising, commerce, customer service provisioning, and collaborations. Companies that have entered the virtual worlds provide various services on their sites that are located in the virtual worlds. Such services include selling their products at virtual stores and holding events such as a quiz contest.
An increasing number of the companies having entered virtual worlds intend to enhance their brand image by allowing avatars to enjoy themselves relatively freely in their sites instead of having any clear goal such as getting avatars to purchase their products. However, some avatars visiting this kind of site for the first time do not know how to act on these sites to enjoy themselves, so that it is beneficial for the avatars to be informed of actions taken by many avatars having visited the site before.
Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2005-056022 describes a method for extracting actions taken by many avatars having visited a site before, for example. In the method described in Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2005-056022, actions of a large number of avatars are recorded and characteristic action patterns shared by many of the avatars are extracted. Specifically, with the method described in Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2005-056022, action patterns shared by many of the moving objects are easily extracted from action histories of a large number of moving objects. Each action pattern includes spots which the moving objects visit, a visit order, and stay times in the respective spots.
Although the method described in Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2005-056022 is a method of storing information on actions of many avatars and extracting characteristic action patterns from the stored information, the method only handles actions of “visiting.” However, avatars take various actions other than “visiting,” so that applying the method described in Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2005-056022 to virtual worlds has a problem that actions of avatars other than “visiting” cannot be retrieved. Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2005-056022 neither describes a method of presenting the extracted action patterns to avatars, nor addresses a problem that a user can have a negative impression on software if the user feels at a loss as to how to operate the software as in the case of how to act in a virtual world.